The Mindful Day: Practical Ways to Find Focus, Calm, and Joy From Morning to Evening

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Foundations of Mindfulness

When people ask me what I do for a living and I say that I teach mindfulness, they usually respond with I’d like to practice mindfulness but I’m so busy I can’t find the time. Or I tried meditating a few times but my mind would not stop racing. You don’t know what it’s like in here, the person will tell me, pointing to his or her head. Most people think mindfulness is something to add to an already full schedule, a special skill that only a few people can learn, or something that only works for people who have a baseline personality of being calm.

Instead, practicing mindfulness is about learning, bit by bit, how to train your attention to stay in the present instead of ruminating over the past or racing into the future. Did you ever tie-dye a T-shirt as a kid? Remember how the more you dipped a white T-shirt into the dye, the more saturated the T-shirt became—richer in color, hue, and depth? So it goes with mindfulness: The more you practice, the more mindful you become, and the more vividly you see the world as you tune in to the moment at hand. In time, you cultivate a different way of being that is more focused, aware, and intentional.

What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the awareness that arises when we deliberately direct our attention toward our inner experience, toward others, and toward the environment around us. But more than just focusing your mind, it’s about your mindset—how you view the world. Mindfulness reinforces a mindset of being open, receptive, accepting, and compassionate. And that starts with noticing your natural tendency to judge, assume you already know something, or resist what life brings or what is out of your control—things that everyone does.

As you practice mindfulness, you’ll start to notice shifts: from being on autopilot, distracted, uneasy, worried about the past or future, to being alert, open, and tuned into the present; from being reactive in difficult moments to being able to take a breath and respond with equanimity and grace; from being lost in thought and judging how things and people should be to seeing things as they are with clear, open friendliness. You put down your ruler and learn acceptance and skillful action.

Your Evolutionary Biology in a Modern World

As hard as it might be to accept, your mind is not present with what you are doing for about half of your life—47 percent of the time on average, according to a 2010 Harvard study. Where is your mind when it’s not in the present? Often, we are ruminating, worrying, obsessing, judging, or occupied with things that have already happened or might happen: the constructs of our mind, rather than reality. Most of the time you don’t stay focused on the book you’re reading, the music you’re listening to, or the colleague who’s speaking to you. We especially don’t stay present for strong or unpleasant emotions like anger and sadness. But what would it mean to tip the scale the other way? What if you could be present for even 10 percent more of your life?

By developing mindfulness, you gain back the moments in your life by witnessing and experiencing them with full attention. You develop a way of being that is clear, compassionate, and wise. It’s a simple idea, but a profound endeavor in today’s environment.

Your brain and nervous system, like the rest of you, is beautifully designed to keep you alive. Because you are built for survival, your brain’s own alarm system is scanning for threats and triggering the flight-fight-freeze stress response to escape what you interpret as danger. Sometimes the dangers are real—but these days we get triggered throughout the day by a comment, a surprise decision, an angry text, and also by the way we relate to our responsibilities and to the people around us. As a human, your neurobiology is designed to react quickly rather than to thoughtfully respond; to feel stress rather than balance; and to hear your inner critic rather than positive, encouraging words of possibility. Furthermore, for safety, you are built to resist the unfamiliar and to distance yourself from those who don’t seem similar to you—in other words, people who aren’t in your tribe. This tendency gets in the way of teaming and collaboration, not to mention world peace.

Take these characteristics of our evolutionary biology—we have minds that are wandering, scanning, and getting distracted—and then equip us with smartphones, laptops, and the Internet. The effects are magnified. And to complicate our tech-saturated scene, we are connected more than ever in a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (referred to as VUCA), and it is easy to understand the forces that came together to create what Time magazine christened the mindfulness revolution. Mindfulness brings wisdom from the past to provide a remedy for today. That means you can train your mind and body to optimize your experience even in this modern world.

Being Human

Navigating the complex world isn’t all that mindfulness addresses, it also helps with the inevitable challenges that life brings—both the joy and the pain. Whether you’re falling in love or receiving bad news at work, grieving a loss or feeling overwhelmed by the suffering in the world, you have choices both in how you relate to the experience and in how you respond. Mindfulness helps you become more conscious of your impulses in those moments. Often when times are hard (and sometimes when joy is intense), our instinctive response is to turn away from the discomfort and turn toward an external escape to take the edge off: perhaps it’s TV, pharmaceuticals, shopping, social media, or a bottle of wine. Although you might get relief, it’s only temporary. The wiser response is to bring attention to what is hard, and you can do this with mindfulness. Our freedom and happiness are in our power to choose how to show up for the life that is right here and now.

The Science of Mindfulness

Since the first steps in mindfulness research in the early 1990s, the number of studies has increased exponentially. The University of California Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley, Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, are among the cutting-edge centers that are studying the science of mindfulness and compassion. Google’s Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which I’ve been a part of for five years, trains its teachers in the neuroscience that is revealing what contemplative wisdom has long suggested: Being present, focused, and compassionate is not something you are born with or without. These are skills that can be strengthened and expanded. Research has shown that you can change your default mental patterns through repeated practice, a concept called neuroplasticity. In other words, the repetition of mental training in effect rewires your brain with new neural pathways that incline you to respond to situations in more skillful ways than automatically reacting out of habit. You get to be in the driver’s seat of shaping your brain through deliberate practice, instead of unwittingly wiring your brain through the influence of cultural norms and your old habits.

People often ask me about the difference between mindfulness and meditation. The two are distinct, yet tightly connected: You can be mindful without meditating, but the research shows that mindfulness meditation is the surefire way to becoming more mindful. Think of it like this: Meditation is to mindfulness as sports is to fitness. Meditation is a body of mental training exercises—and there are many forms—that are designed to develop skills, strengthen your mind, and produce immediate states and long-term outcomes. Research on the benefits of meditation has exploded in recent years, and Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman suggest that these mindful states start to have lasting effects. For example, the traditional compassion practice of wishing well not only creates a greater sense of positive emotion and well-being immediately in the meditator, but also contributes to more kind, generous, and altruistic behaviors. In a recent meta-analysis of the wealth of mindfulness research available, researchers found that mindfulness meditation—maintaining a moment-by-moment receptive awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, often using an object of focus—increases attentional control, emotional regulation, and self-awareness. One study found that meditators lose less gray matter over time compared with nonmeditators; another study suggests that meditation may reduce the cognitive decline associated with aging. Meditation has been shown to alter gene expression, lowering the body’s inflammatory response to disease and other stressors, and to lengthen telomeres, markers for longevity of life.

In addition to the outpouring of scientific research, stories from meditators around the world attest to the benefits of a consistent mindfulness practice. Mindfulness exercises, which you’ll learn in many forms in the pages that follow, can help you stay awake and present and tap into the powers of acceptance, gratitude, and compassion. My students often tell me that they feel more freedom in their daily lives, as well as more energy and a deeper sense of well-being when they practice mindfulness—whether via meditation or by doing everyday activities mindfully. As they gain greater insight into how their minds work, and develop stronger mental skills, they feel more capable of making meaningful choices, and they gain confidence from knowing that they can access a calm, grounded presence on demand.

Here’s the bottom line—and the incredible opportunity: You can learn to radically shift how you relate to your daily experiences and to other people. The awareness that arises from mindful attention to your inner thoughts, emotions, and perceptions begins to bring more vivid detail for knowing yourself. This self-awareness is at the heart of self-mastery—of being the person you want to be. It amounts to having a longer, richer life, because you are present for much more of it. And we can all do this.

How to Strengthen Your Mind Every Day

If you’ve been in a room while a choral ensemble is harmonizing, watched children performing a school play, walked along a stream in the forest, held the hand of someone near death, or looked into the face of a newborn, you know what the energy of pure presence and connection feels like. Everyday mindfulness is about cultivating these vivid moments more consistently into your life—to find joy and wonder in the ordinary instead of waiting for special occasions. Just understanding that mindfulness is a trainable skill is a first step, and now you need to know how to go about it.

Many of us are used to driving ourselves hard, and might think of training as a way to try to force change, to push, pull, and pressure ourselves into becoming something different. Mindfulness encourages a different approach. In this book you will find two main ways of training: with formal, dedicated practices, often in the form of a meditation. You will also find informal ways of training that you integrate into your day. Either way, the central skill is focused attention to your body, thoughts, emotions, or surroundings whenever you notice that you’re lost in thought. Attention by itself may be focused, but it becomes mindfulness only when coupled with the skill of meta-awareness—the ability to know your current state of mind that monitors that attentiveness. And there’s another dimension to this: Mindfulness is about paying attention with kindness and compassion, instead of judging or self-disparaging. In my teacher training with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, they call this loving-awareness.

Qualities of Mindfulness

The following 10 qualities not only guide you toward mindful living; they can become part of who you are and how you see the world. Think of them as attitudes, principles, and even mindsets that support and strengthen mindfulness. Mindfulness is not only about paying attention; it also includes how you pay attention. As you become familiar with these attitudes, and practice and strengthen them with the meditations and through the everyday exercises in this book, they will begin to arise naturally as you become more mindful:

• Awareness arises when you are alert and awake to whatever is in the moment-to-moment flow of your immediate experience. It’s the ability to know, sense, perceive, feel, or to be cognizant of what is happening, which is also called consciousness. Mindful awareness is the recognition of what is present here and now, without judgment. When you are present, you are aware.

• Beginner’s Mind is seeing things as if for the first time, with openness, receptivity, and curiosity. It’s a clear lens through which you suspend what you know about an object, person, or concept, and allow yourself to look outward (or inward) with greater clarity. Beginner’s Mind is the opposite of being the expert, and makes room for new ideas, novelties, and outcomes. Seeing with fresh eyes can bring back a sense of wonder and awe to people, situations, and moments that have become ordinary—which then invites gratitude and joy.

• Acceptance is the capacity and willingness to see things as they really are. We may not always like what we find—but allowing feelings and circumstances to be, rather than trying to resist or trying to force change (which just creates struggle and stress), is a good start. An important caveat here: Acceptance has nothing to do with being passive. It’s an active choice in which you learn to say, This is what life is like right now, or my shorthand phrase It’s like this, without wishing things were different. Acceptance sets the stage for letting go.

• Insight is the aha moment of clarity. It’s the capacity to have a clear, accurate understanding. It comes from experimenting with mindfulness and looking deeply at your thoughts, behaviors, and habits. Mindful awareness helps you see cause and effect in everything you do, and helps you develop a wisdom about how things work.

• Impermanence reminds us that nothing stays as it is—in nature, weather, our bodies, emotions, political systems, family dynamics. Yet we often wish things would stay the same. When you see the world as impermanent, you deepen attention to what is here now because you appreciate that it is temporary. And you suffer less when things do change, knowing that you were fully present to connect, savor, and enjoy your life as it was and is in each moment.

• Equanimity is the state of emotional calmness or nonreactivity; it is being aware of whatever is happening without being swept away by it—good or bad. This attitude involves learning to put aside your preferences so that you can be with what’s actually there. There is a powerful freedom and a pervasive easygoingness to equanimity. When you cultivate equanimity, life’s everyday problems won’t rock you and overwhelm you as much, and you won’t feel a need to cling to what’s pleasurable. It’s related to patience, which is the ability to maintain composure in the face of things you don’t like, or to stick with difficult situations even when they don’t resolve as quickly as you’d like.

• Interconnection is a quality of the world we live in, and it can become a quality of ourselves, too. Thich Nhat Hanh encourages us to perceive inter-being with others, with nature, with the entire global ecosystem. This state of mind influences how we care for one another: We recognize that we are dependent on each other, and are cognizant of how we affect our habitat and those around us. We are ourselves, but at the same time we are all each other—people with fears, hopes, and the longing for love.

• Compassion is attending to the experience of suffering with the wish to alleviate it. It’s applied in the desire to reduce the suffering of others, or reduce our own suffering ( self-compassion). Compassion starts with empathy—understanding and being sensitive to the experience of pain or discomfort—and adds the component of seeking to be of service, to bring some degree of relief. There is generosity in compassion. You can ask yourself, What would best serve here?

• Gratitude comes from directing attention to what is good, with appreciation for it. There are two components to being grateful. The first is affirming that there are good things in the world, and that you receive gifts and benefits. The second is recognizing that the sources of these good things are outside of you. Other people—or if you’re of a spiritual mindset, a higher power—contribute to the positive parts of your life. This reinforces that you’re part of something bigger than yourself, and promotes feelings of belonging, interconnection, and joy. Gratitude generates the sense of I have enough, a springboard for generosity.

• Joy is a deep sense of well-being infused with delight. Joy is an innate human capacity, connected to your ability to experience wonder and awe. It comes from within, not from external conditions, people, or rewards. Mindfulness helps you recognize what brings you joy, and what blocks it. And it helps you find ways to access this uplifting quality in everyday life.

Mental Training Basics

We know that whatever you practice grows stronger: For example, each time you catch your mind wandering and then redirect your attention, you strengthen your meta-awareness. Think of it as a mental rep, just like the exercises you might do at the gym or the drills on the piano. The following are a set of core practices that train the foundational skills and attitudes of mindfulness and compassion. What follows are the basics—and throughout the book, you will discover specific applications and ways to weave these, along with additional practices, into your day.

Mindful Breathing

Following your breath as you inhale and exhale is the basic mindfulness meditation practice that trains attention, cultivates awareness, settles the mind, and calms the body. The breath serves as an anchor for attention that you can use wherever you are. When your mind wanders, you return it to your anchor and strengthen your ability to direct, stabilize, and sustain your focus at will. You will learn about other anchors you can use later in the book—but remember that the breath is always available to you. The following steps are a reliable, natural way to calm yourself and come back to the present:

1. Feel the sensations of breathing: air coming in at the nose, and your chest or abdomen rising and falling.

2. Recognize when your mind wanders, and gently return your attention to the breath.

3. Follow the full cycle of breathing: the inhale, the exhale, and the space in between breaths.

4. Use helpful phrases, such as In, Out , or Here, Calm , or count breaths to support your attention as you inhale and exhale.

Body Scan

Often taught as the first formal practice for beginners, the body scan is a way to systematically move attention through your body, one part at a time. The best way to strengthen self-awareness is to bring mindfulness to the body, where you start to develop high-resolution awareness of emotions. Most people are disconnected from the body, but as you practice the body scan, you get better at distinguishing emotions by recognizing the physiological sensations that give rise to them. Emotions begin in the body—for example, a clenched stomach might signal fear. Emotions are physical responses to stimuli—whether they are someone’s beaming smile, a sudden car horn, or a surprise phone call. As you become more familiar with inhabiting your body, it becomes a rich source of data that can inform and guide decisions. You can do a body scan in a few minutes, or in 30. I recommend starting with about 10 minutes.

1. Start in a position that is alert and relaxed. Allow your eyes to close gently if you like. Feel the full support of the floor or the chair beneath your body.

2. Begin with breathing. Allow your breath to flow naturally, easily flowing in and out of your body. If you become distracted or your mind wanders during the body scan, you can bring your attention back to your breath, and then pick up where you left off.

3. First focus on your lower body. On your next exhale, follow that breath all the way down through your body and bring attention to your feet. Starting with left or right, notice any sensations of tingling, temperature, or pulsing. Turn awareness to your toes, the ball of your foot, the heel, the arch, the top of your foot. Then move up to the ankle, lower leg, upper leg on both sides. As you do so, try to release sensations of tightness or tension.

4. Continue this process for your whole body up to your head. As you check in with each part of your body, you might notice strong sensations, such as heat or coolness, pressure, or aching. See if you can observe without judging, evaluating, or prompting your mind to wander off in a story about what gave rise to the sensation.

5. Finally, when you’ve moved from your toes to the crown of your head, be aware of your body as